The role of the media
There's a growing cultural awareness about the way manipulative media outlets which portray themselves as being impartial and fact-based are carefully arranging their presentations in order to further political aims. The news also seeks to entertain and interest, motivated by increasing viewership, ad revenue and ratings. Some of these motivations go against common ideals.
I am quite interested in how ad revenue works on sites like youtube where it's determined by viewership, which takes away some of the power of those paying for ad space. Lately, I've felt conflicted about what the news should be and then how to ensure that media outlets are rewarded for doing whats in our best interests as opposed to that being different to what's best in theirs.
What do you think the role of the media should be within a democracy and are you satisfied or dissatisfied with how things are now.
I am quite interested in how ad revenue works on sites like youtube where it's determined by viewership, which takes away some of the power of those paying for ad space. Lately, I've felt conflicted about what the news should be and then how to ensure that media outlets are rewarded for doing whats in our best interests as opposed to that being different to what's best in theirs.
What do you think the role of the media should be within a democracy and are you satisfied or dissatisfied with how things are now.
Comments (74)
Popularist, biased, sensationalist, irrational, unresearched, lacking in nuance = the current benchmark. Straight from the bowels of the limbic system with scant use of logic. VICE is just as bad as FOX.
Case and point: Louis C.K.
In its simplest term the role of the media would be to inform people about the world they’re living in. Alongside the news stories there might be the editors opinion piece; a personal or long view of some event or issue. That’s the readers experience.
The other role is that of the owners or investors. There were owners who had genuine beliefs in the role of their newspaper. They hired editors and let them run the newspaper on the basis of the reason they hired them. To a large degree there was integrity involved on all sides.
Some were powerful and biased in their views and what they supported. The Hearst empire for instance. But newspapers like The New York Times we’re respected in traditional terms of owner, editors and journalism,
Putting aside companies like the Hearst organisation I think it was probably television that marked the first change. Advertising revenue for one, and competing with video and then live stories. In time family ownership went and the accountants took precedence. So long integrity, so long real journalism,
Unfortunately “Freedom of the Press” is something we still regard as vital to a healthy society. But the media no longer operates in ways that served that purpose. They’re like a prostitute that goes around in virgin white.
The important question to me is how do we remove them without hurting ourselves and how do we replace them?
Maybe it depends on what the people call news.
Good point. The OP is pretty clearly specifying 'news media', however.
Isn’t it perfectly clear? It’s about media that delivers the news. What we can argue over is what is and what isn’t news.
Nah man. Gotta turn it into a 9 page discussion about semantics drenched in profanity and emotion all while eluding the point. Haven't you learned anything?
Thank god. I thought I was losing it.
Quoting tim wood
No we don’t have to. We can just agree that we’re talking about what the news media delivers and consequently what role it has or should have in a democracy.
The question of how to ensure that students get an unbiased education is thus a broader version of the more specific question of how to ensure news readers get unbiased information.
That entire problem is in turn analogous to the question of how to ensure fairness in governance. Avoiding bias in public institutes is the most general issue here.
Separation and balance of powers is one factor in that general solution. Applied to academia, that means separation of research, testing, and teaching: students should be tested by one party taught to them by another party from informational resources compiled by another party still.
That research then need to be peer-reviewed from a broad base. Rather than relying on primary sources directly, secondary sources like journals need to evaluate the quality and significance of those primary sources, and then tertiary sources like encyclopedias and textbooks need to compile the consensus opinion of those secondary sources.
The teachers then need to teach from those tertiary sources. Teachers need to be free to choose their sources to teach from, and students need to be free to choose their teachers.
When it comes to news, this fleshes out to a network of independent on-the-ground reporters submitting their primary research, an array of various secondary sources evaluating those reports, and then lastly some tertiary bodies compiling all those evaluations. It is those tertiary compilations of the evaluations of the primary reports that the news should be passing on to readers.
The money then needs to flow the other direction, from reader (even if via ad impressions; or perhaps even some kind of government news subsidy?) to newspaper to tertiary source to secondary source to primary reporter.
What we basically have right now is the equivalent of primary researchers teaching their “latest findings“ as though it was already settled science directly to undergrads. The whole filter of sanity checking and consensus building is missing.
News is mentioned enough to make it more specific I thought, but, yeah, kind of misleading to conflate it with 'communication mediums'.
How is 'news media' a BS term? It's defining media used by news outlets, and is apparently synonymous with saying 'news industry' -- sounds obvious enough. It's even got its own Wikipedia page.
Quoting Judaka
This is part of the problem, just whose interests? So much diversity, so many tribes, who should they serve? Does it end up with the media only serving a target audience which in effect is an echo chamber.
The role of the media in a democracy; is it to serve democracy, to reinforce those values, to have opinions that support it? Or is it’s role to question and enquire whatever the outcome, or in a democracy is it allowed to be whatever it wants?
True, but not limited to the so-called mainstream media. There's biased media all the way from Democracy Now! to CNN. Also from Infowars to Fox news. All media is biased.
I think the role of the media should be to continue growing. Keep the means to reach an audience open to anyone. That’s why I would say censorship is the most pressing issue growing forward. Suppression is absolute, and we’re letting the means of mass communication be controlled and regulated by vast companies and governments. The gates of information have been opened but some still cling to their power.
At any rate, I suspect that we are dealing with this new world of accessible information in our own way.
As for the news, I think the turn from objectivity to advocacy journalism has had deleterious effects to the entire enterprise.
How it happened I don’t know, maybe it’s not new, but it seems to me that we all generally take our news from a source that fits our narrative, or reject that that doesn’t. That can happen because there’s so many news sources out there of all persuasions and all sizes.
The news services are the only way we have of monitoring and revealing the truth about politicians and politics, or business and bent products. But that faith we can have in any single source is slipping, because logically I should treat all sources with suspicion. If I’m going to chose to distrust certain sources based on my existing understanding of things then I should apply that to all sources, I should approach all stories with scepticism, even the ones that I agree with. So the worm is in there, now I can’t be sure that the truth is out there, that it even exists. I don’t have time to do fact checking, that’s why I went to the news source in the first place.
What happens after that? Just faith?
Why would people watch something they didn't enjoy, tolerate, or that otherwise doesn't oppose their own complacency and ingrained sense of what is and what isn't. Most people here are a bit more refined- I'd imagine. It comes down to a sense of apparent ease presiding over both longterm assessment of logic or perhaps even chance.
People are biased. You have a child and say you know there's another next door. Assuming the law is not an issue, both are hungry and you only have enough to feed one.. after feeding yourself of course. Who do you feed? It's pretty much on par with biological necessity like oxygen.
Quoting Wheatley
And then what? It still comes down to what you chose to read and then make a decision that yes, that sounds true, or yes, I trust that journalist. And why should I doubt my critical reasoning skills as they are?
It shouldn't be different than shopping for clothes.
Quoting Brett
There's always room for improvement.
Do we want the news media to have a role in democracy when it is in effect a corporation having a role in democracy?
Quoting Wheatley
That’s my point. Clothes are chosen based on fashion leanings, practical reasons or just frivolous, but they’re all desires to maintain your subjective narrative.
Quoting Wheatley
Determined by my comprehension of a news story?
What exactly is the problem? I choose media based reputation.
Quoting Brett
Determined by your ability to argue about the news with others.
Quoting Wheatley
I’m not sure what you mean there. But my feeling is that we are not to be held responsible for standards of the media. Those standards have been set by business interests.
You can say that particular news sources should be rejected by people, or that they should be better at analysing what they’re reading, but people chose a source they feel comfortable with. You might have leanings to the right and consequently reject news sources from what you regard as the left and feel they’re unreliable. Does that mean the stories from the left are sub standard, or that you’ve failed to read them carefully enough?
Quoting Wheatley
What I mean there is that just because I reject a news source or story doesn’t mean my critical reasoning is poor.
That doesn't mean we can't do anything about it. If a media source has a reputation of deceiving its viewers, it is up to the viewers to stop watching it. Putting the blame on the media source is convenient, but only solves one half of the problem. The other problem is the demand for bad media, and is totally on us.
Quoting Brett
Bad media comes from both isles of the political spectrum. Your political point of view shouldn't be an obstacle for you to avoid low quality journalism.
Okay.
If i said The New York Times was not just a poor newspaper but a bad one what would you reply?
I shouldn’t have used that word.
What is your reason why you say The New York Times is a poor newspaper.
Do you think it is or not?
But what do you think of it as a news source?
Much better than a lot that’s out there, but not perfect.
If I don’t think that then how do we decide if it is or isn’t?
That’s a really, really good question.
We need a criteria for judging media.
There is a feedback loop, with media adjusting content to what sells the most copy, and consumers voting with their cash for the content they like to see. Consumers might not know what kind of content they want to see in advance, and vendors might not know that something is going to sell in advance. Ultimately it's a conspiracy between consumers and capitalists to produce content that is like the content those consumers want.
An example in my country is the development of an entire media dedicated to the fantasy that the middle class is under constant attack. This sort of fantasy, while obviously appealing to a surprising majority of middle class English suburbanites with delicious victimisation complexes, can be very easily hijacked by the political interests of the owners and their affiliates.
If, for instance, it were politically expedient for such owners to get the ball properly rolling on climate change action, they would cast resistance to such action as an attack on the middle class from both sides: the laziness of the working and unemployed classes expecting the middle classes to suffer for their inaction; the cynicism of the financial elite class letting the world burn in the knowledge that they can always buy themselves into a safety zone. However, while the trend is shifting toward this (in a Who can we blame? sort of way), the current editorial stance is to resist climate change action, since it tends to impact other interests the owners have (since they are capitalists). As such, climate change action is an attack of the middle classes by virtue of them footing the bulk of the bill through government spending on wasteful solutions to unproven climate concern and hikes in utility bills targeted at them, the majority of bill-payers. The stance fulfils the full gamut of the paranoid consumers: they are being robbed by literally everyone, and they are being lied to about it.
So it's a two-way street. Such readers are believing what they are told because of who is telling them. And the vendors are creating content that such readers have endorsed in the past.
You are right, though, such readers are absolutely free to choose media that has no vested political interest or financial affiliations, and they typically do not. Ultimately, the game is only played this way because they insist on playing it, therefore do deserve the lion's share of the blame.
I think that we can't avoid having the news media being involved in the democratic process and that's not something we want to avoid but I think it could be good to do an investigation on how the news makes it money and whether that incentivises practices that help inform the public fairly or not.
https://tinyurl.com/yaxsa5pz
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/375368-cable-news-ad-revenue-up-25-percent-over-2017-with-msnbcs-rising-62-percent
Distrust of the news is increasing but profits are soaring.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/267047/americans-trust-mass-media-edges-down.aspx
Are the business aspects of increasing viewership and ad revenue at odds with fair reporting? One of the things that really stood out to me was the 2016 election. Mostly, how much more coverage Trump got than other candidates.
https://shorensteincenter.org/research-media-coverage-2016-election/
The reporting can be measured by positive versus negative reports, who decides how much they do of each and what is their reasoning?
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/
Another consideration is that some news outlets are publicly listed companies, they're tasked with providing value for their shareholders. Jobs are kept and lost based on the same metrics any business would use, the ideals of journalism aren't part of that. I'm sure sometimes it's good to be seen as doing a good job but equally sometimes doing a good job may lose on the business metrics of $$$.
I don't think the answer is to remove them but to restructure how succeeding on the business side of things isn't at odds with our ideals about their role but what are our ideals about their role? Is it possible for the news to be objectively reported in the first place? Is it bad for the news to be politically motivated and if we expect them to comment on politics then how can we draw a line between that and intent to manipulate the viewer into voting a particular way? Is it wrong for them to do that in the first place?
Quoting Judaka
Even a privately owned outlet has to make a profit. Maybe not to quite the same degree. But they need a loyal readership. There could be any number of reasons for someone sticking to one outlet. How do you hold on to them, by being totally unbiased or by targeting their political and social leanings? Can any outlet operate on a totally unbiased platform?
In some ways it might be better to have them obviously biased, at least we’d know what’s behind their stories, no more pretence of objectivity.
Quoting Judaka
This is one of the really interesting points I think. Why?
It looks like people have an insatiable appetite for news, even if they mistrust it. So why are they watching or reading it? It seems to me that news now means something different than it was. It serves some different purpose, like those people in the street who keep checking their phones every few minutes. I don’t think it’s about being informed. Which suggests it doesn’t really matter what the news is but that it’s just presented as news so that it fills the habitual desire to check the news. So let’s say it’s a drug.
Edit: that’s the msm.
This OP hasn’t really taken off. Probably because it’s not regarded as “philosophy”. But there is a big question buried in your OP.
Democrat is an agreed upon myth. If that is true and that the sharing in the belief in that myth is shrinking or fragmenting then what role is there for the news media. If the democracy myth is fragmenting then the idea of truth as we’ve been living it also fragments into a thousand versions of it. There’s no place for a news source to claim an objective truth telling any more. That does sort of play into the hands of relativism, but what other conclusion could I draw from what I see?
Yeah, a privately owned company has to make a profit but there's not much of a chance for shareholders caring about the ideals of journalism and democracy, their motivation can only be financial. Either way, criticism is just noise if it's not hurting their bottom line.
For the CEOs of the organisations, their financial rewards and job security depend on financial success, so the figures may show that financial success does not require trust in the reporting. Alternatively, you just need a loyal base even if larger percentages of the public are becoming sceptical. So yeah, it may be the case that people are there to be entertained rather than be informed. I think this could be fine as long as the news doesn't try to appear objective when it's not because that is manipulative.
When it comes to democracy, we know politicians lie and lie about really important things. The white house can't be trusted to tell the truth, their political opponents can't be trusted and the news is not only being described as "fake news" by the president but faith in the news has been declining even before Trump.
Huge money in politics, huge money in news reporting and where are the incentives or checks and balances for informing the public about the truth? I don't really see these issues being resolved any time soon.
There was a time when people actually got their news from reading a newspaper that basically had everything that had happened the day before or earlier. That "deadline" when printing machine is turned on gave some time for journalists. But then not only came radio and television, but 24 hour news channels and finally us having computers disguised as phones in our pocket that instantly tell us about if anything important happens. And then people learn about things through the social media. The role of being like the Associated Press (AP), a not-for-profit news agency, is very limited today.
The blurring of a news and "news commentary" is the basic problem why we are talking about fake news. Old school journalism isn't popular anymore, it seems that we are going back to the 19th Century where the "workers newspapers" and the "newspapers of the bourgeoisie" described alternate universes. Once you started having national newspapers, these then applied a tone that felt good for the general public. And if earlier the political tone of a media outlet was subtle, today it isn't with many anymore. Perhaps it's an answer to the rise of the social media.
I think journalists in the traditional media could butt heads with their host networks and the large corporations supplying the money and occasionally get controversial stories on air. But, with Internet media, there is no one in particular to butt heads with. If a story in traditional media fought its way on air, it was guaranteed to be seen by many people due to lack of choice in media outlets. Now, a news site can publish quality journalism but there’s no guarantee that people will pay attention. And, given the way people’s attention span has shrunk in a click bait culture, there is no reason to think people will care unless that story isn’t interpreted in a really click baity way. In a weird way, censorship isn’t even necessary. The whole structure of the new media leans people into paying attention to the hyperbolic - “the watch ‘so and so’ destroy his or her rival” type headlines. We’ve effectively self-censored ourselves by shrinking our attention spans.
I think that’s why I take so much solace in philosophy. It’s hard to read - really hard, and it demands your attention. Even more than supplying critical thinking skills, I think it just forces you to sit still with a text and that’s invaluable and rare right now.
Quoting ssu
That would be the days of a shared narrative, the shared myth. The myth can only sustain so many people then it falls apart. I think that’s where we are now. How can objective news even mean anything anymore? How many people can it hold together? How many no longer relate to it? It’s so alien to them as an idea that they no longer trust it. A collective truth? That seems absurd these days.
There was a time of limited news outlets that we watched and listened to. And in many cases they did separate "the news" and the "the program discussing the news". Perhaps people don't know (or remember), but for example in the US Walter Cronkite was highly respected and trusted during his time.
Quoting Brett
Things that happen are true. We still can agree on such. Why they happened, what do they mean or are they important is a different matter.
The role of the news media in a democracy.
Should the news media support Democracy unquestionably, should it question and challenge aspects of Democracy when it senses a deviation, should it challenge governments on policies, even if those policies are developed to protect democracy but they deviate from democratic ideals?
To do that we would need well educated and experienced people at the helm of the news media. They would have to have integrity, a keen sense of morality, inside knowledge of what’s behind government actions and trust from those government institutions. They would have to be free from influence and coercion, unimpressed by offers of money and benefits, disinterested in power except in the interests of the news outlet.
In an ideal situation they would almost be a partner in the democratic process. Their own interests would be democracy itself. The part they play in the democratic process would also reward them and benefit them as a result.
But how or in what way could they be rewarded? What form could it take without perverting and corrupting itself over time?
If they actively disagree with an elected government how far should they go or be allowed to go? How much should they be allowed to reveal?
That is an interesting perspective, I think you might be right. I was reading an article that described the battle between FOX and CNN led CNN to change from its more objective news reporting approach.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/fox-news-cnn-change-evolution-2010-2019-11?r=US&IR=T
One thing that wasn't explained is why CNN was only trusted by 40% of viewers compared to FOX's 50%+, in 2010 may have to try to dig for that. Certainly though, if CNN is forced to change its approach like this, it may be true that youtube news reporting/commentary will follow the same logic. Since this article makes it seem like at least for CNN, the change was the result of being unable to compete with their flashier, more entertaining competition.
How does Al Jazeera and Julian Assange fit into all this?
Assange has more to do with how Western governments withhold information from the public that they really shouldn't. The US commits war crimes, they perform covert operations and they don't answer to the public on these matters because they hide the occurrence. On some issues, it seems the US was wrong to withhold the information on others, it seems Assange has jeopardized military and intelligence agencies by releasing sensitive material.
I don't know anything about Al Jazeera.
Quoting Judaka
Possibly true, but it begs the question about the role of the news media in a democracy; just how much freedom is needed to protect a democracy?
Quoting Judaka
Nothing?
Well the matter of intelligence agencies is definitely interesting because by their nature, they need secrecy but that means doing it behind the backs of the people who are supposed to be your boss. I think much of what agencies have done that has been released such as staging coups and arming radical militants in foreign lands, would not have been supported by the public. The people of the US were never given a chance to have an opinion on these actions.
Also for military secrecy, from Vietnam to Afghanistan has the US in modern times fought a war without also fighting to withhold and control the information the public has access to? Later on, when the details come out, wars that seemed controversial just appear to be utterly foolish. If the American people had full knowledge of what the government knew, the wars would have been viewed even less favourably than they already were.
What has been done that the next president will think twice to control the information to manipulate the public? Or to have agencies perform controversial operations that the public wouldn't agree with? Nothing, it seems to me. If you want to call the government out on it, then you may lose your freedom. I'm not sure what the answer is though.
What point were you bringing up about Al Jazeera? I hadn't heard of them.
Quoting Judaka
Because it’s a respected and state funded international news service owned by Qatari as opposed to private ownership.
Yeah, I did read that after you mentioned it, it's interesting. I would have thought that was the solution but I am becoming more convinced that the issue is viewership and the fact that people aren't entertained by the hard facts. Would a government support a news service that wasn't getting viewership? Anyway, I'll look into Al Jazeera a bit more and formulate an opinion.
By the way, which YouTube news are you watching? I watch Democracy Now from time to time but unfortunately my brain is so accustomed to the dopamine fix of network news, I don’t stick with it for too long. That’s more my fault then Democracy Now’s fault though.
In all honesty, over the last few years, I rarely check the news on a daily basis. I don’t know if that is an ethically responsible position to take or a rational one for someone interested in politics. I just found that if you follow a news story daily, there’s so much repetition and overreaction. For every 10 sentences in a news article, you get maybe one sentence worth of new information each day. Journalists and content providers are desperate for content and produce so much more quantity than quality. What I’ve tried to do is identify a few journalists that I like reading and who I trust and just follow them. I get the news at a much slower pace but it’s more coherent overall and less manic in feel.
I completely agree with your sentiments about the daily news.
I'm really into documentaries rather than news, though I do get news in my youtube feed that I occasionally watch but that's mostly from the television news youtube channels. There are some news commentators on youtube in the past that I listened to but at some point I started to feel like the news is an unfinished story. Here's an example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42493918
This is a summary of the Trump-Russia election investigation that was reported on for years, I hear about it but I don't want to hear about it every night. I prefer to keep up to date this way, slightly delayed but convenient, I don't even want to form an opinion until all the facts are out anyway.
Quoting Judaka
That’s an interesting point. Real information about an event or series of events is found in a booK on the subject, which takes months of research and writing. Even a documentary is caught in the process of production. So you end up getting a very detailed and analysed report but it comes to you sometime after the event. So it suggests in some ways that the dailies, tv and internet coverage cannot really give you reliable in depth reporting, which means the facts are very superficial and quite often incorrect in the rush get the story out. It’s more about the sensation of news, the dramatic headline and video that follow. If there’s no video there’s no story. So it’s the image that creates the importance of the story. And there’s no shortage of video available online; everyone has a phone. But there’s no time to verify the accuracy of the video supplied.
Can you explain this a bit more? Do you mean viewers are in control of what ads they want to see? If yes then what needs mentioning is tailoring ads to a person's usage pattern is a greater level of manipulation, requiring knowledge of "intimate details" of that person, no? The issue of privacy pops up with viewing behavior-based ads.
I may have misunderstood you.
I mean that the content creator gets ads on their channel without creating a contract with the company paying for the ad because their contract is through youtube. As opposed to a direct relationship with greater influence for the companies over the image and reporting of the news company. I am pretty much at a point now where I don't think this idea will improve anything because of discussions in this thread and my own research.
Also, I am not interested in an actually objective news station but whether one tries to be objective or not. Whether or not that's the primary objective or if they have a political agenda. I am not sure that being objective is best, what's the worst is where they brand themselves as objective but have a clear political agenda because that's highly manipulative.
Yeah, agree.
All the facts?
Wait about 10 years and you'll have a pretty clear view what happened in the best histories written about the Trump era. All the secret files come out in about 40 years or so, so then you clearly have the best view possible about the facts. At that time with good luck, you perhaps even can have the Russian archives open and Russian history done about the Trump era, as likely Putin isn't in power anymore.
At worst case there's this Trump mystery, something similar to JFK assassination.
Quoting Judaka
There have been stories about advertisers pressuring media owners about content they’re not happy with by threatening to withdraw advertising. Usually it’s because of some aspect of their business (not just theirs but genetically, like cigarette companies) that has not looked good in the news. That’s not uncommon. Very big corporations can hurt media companies by pulling advertising. But then again if that media outlet has a big chunk of readership that includes their target audience then they’re not likely to walk away permanently. It’s more like a smack on the knuckles.
As your links suggest the public can make people feel their displeasure, like the NFL experienced. But if someone likes a newspaper or news channel then they are likely to return in the near future, despite some irritability over a story or opinion piece, because it’s their news outlet of choice.
The question is does advertising revenue affect content in terms of issues like politics and ultimately democratic process? News outlets had huge readership levels during Trump’s campaign. They new what was happening and they loved it. The NYT did very well, and they will again this year. The higher the readership levels the higher the advertising rates go.
Trump got a huge amount of coverage that others would have to pay for in advertising rates. So the news media will go where the readership goes, which for them equals advertising revenue. The interesting thing is how will the NYT run stories on Trump? If they ignore him they lose revenue. And they can’t support him. But they need him to sell more papers to get more advertising revenue, so they have to feature him. So in some ways they’re a victim. Of what though: politics or economics?
I get what you mean, honestly, to some extent that's actually what is needed in some cases. The correct understanding of the Vietnam war as one example can only be attained after a lot of secret details became public. At least, all I meant was that things become clearer with time and easier to digest, so waiting a little while for more to come out can be a good way to go.
Well, it's certainly easy to draw parallels between Trump's success and his media coverage, it's free advertising and it doesn't appear to matter if it's negative.
I think it's fair to say that news reporting can be and has been influenced by big companies due to advertising rights. It can be argued that from the perspective of increasing viewership, choices will be made that take the focus away from objective news reporting or simply toss out objectivity because it isn't as interesting to viewers.
On top of that, for many, there may never have been a real attempt at objectivity to begin with and the news reporting was always intended to be either manipulative or overtly biased.
I think it is economic, there's a financial incentive to comment on Trump, negatively or positively, because it sells. Political biases exist but if it wasn't doing well financially then I think we would see changes. Just as CNN have changed to compete with their competition from more objective to more opinionated, it would have happened in the opposite way if the financial incentive led towards objective reporting.
It's a supply-demand issue, people prefer opinionated reporting because it's entertaining, I don't know if there's any way of financing reporting that doesn't react to the demand for opinionated reporting. I really don't know what the solution might be. I don't know the reporting we see currently is a symptom of the current political climate or part of what created it but I do think it will be a factor in its continuation.
Sure, if the bureaucracy functions and the archives genuinely do exist and aren't burned. :roll:
Quoting Judaka
But I do assume we can typically notice this, right?
Sure, if there a total block on some issue, we won't know, but otherwise there's enough of different media outlets to notice which bias or agenda some media outlet has. Hence noticing the differences how Fox or MSNBC, BBC or RTV report on something is quite easy (assuming that you have the time to follow them). And once you know their modus operandi, it's easy to listen to them.
I'm completely in the dark regarding how businesses are run on the web but if you're correct then it looks very much like businesses are getting a free ride - piggybacking on channel content creators without paying a penny for it. The company for which a particular ad is supposed to serve gets the chance to showcase its products to the right audience - the people who're guranteed to try out their products - and all without spending the extra amount that would've gone to the person who made it possible, the content creators of news channels. It's as if content creators are being excluded from a very lucrative deal in my opinion.
:confused:
Quoting Judaka
:sad:
Quoting Judaka
Interesting. Imagine if newspapers went that way; someone outside the “news” outlet, the man in the street with us phone, supplies the stories/news and shares the space on the pages with advertisers who pay for space. So the news is really there as a hook to the advertisers target audience, and the news content is also targeted at that same audience otherwise the advertisers would not have its target audience. So in the end “news” is any content that pulls in a target audience. There’s probably nothing new in that except that news outlets don’t really need journalists anymore, and they no longer pretend to be objective news sources.
But has it been naive of us to have gone along with the importance of “freedom of the press“ and the idea of the fourth estate?
I think that when it comes to issues like manipulative news reporting, it does come down to what one thinks about the average listener. Many times when it comes to issues like this, I meet people who think very highly of the average citizen, that they are worldly and intelligent while I tend to think that the average citizen is maybe good at a few things but has extremely limited knowledge of even basic things.
If one of the articles I listed, polling suggested that 40% of news listeners trust the news and another said over 50% of viewers trusted Fox news and around 75% of republicans trusted FOX news. When we look at the current political polarisation as well, I do not really believe that we can assume that the major news reporting biases are being identified and deftly bypassed by viewers. Rather, it seems more appropriate to view them as being highly successful in their manipulative practices.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/fox-news-lashes-out-at-cnn-with-new-ad-2010-2
The pollster was Public Pollicy Polling, I looked for information on them and apparently they even have a democrat bias.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/
I think freedom of the press is important, when you look at a country like China, they have their own set of problems due to a lack of freedom in their press. It seems we're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The trend is clear, we probably haven't seen things as bad as they will get, polarisation will accelerate due to the biased reporting.
That doesn't mean I want to trust the government to handle things though, the news is one of the most powerful forces in keeping the government honest.
Quoting Judaka
So even in its biased, economic based practices it still functions to the degree enough that governments are put on notice, where there is always the possibility they will be exposed. Obviously life without them would be far worse and China’s a good enough sample. And even if the public was educated enough to understand the manipulation of the press, or just the influence of imagery, they would still lean towards the news source that gelled with their own perspective. News outlets still get sued for distortion or misinformation, and their mistakes are always public for everyone to see because they’re always watching each other and waiting to pounce in their own interests. So in a way it works. Not perfect but not too bad either.